Mr. Gowen bravely fulfilled his pledge not to submit. His principal occupation became the championship in the courts and the Interstate Commerce Commission of those who were oppressed by this crushing power. His incorruptible lance was always in place, until the morning he was found dead in his room in Washington. The oil combination had, up to this time, sent all its oil east by rail as it had no pipe line, and its faithful fools, the railroads, therefore burned their fingers with joy to roast the Tidewater for so good a customer. But while the railroad officials were wasting their employers' property to destroy the combination's new competitor, its astute managers, seeing how good a thing pipe lines were, quietly built a system of their own to the seaboard. The railroads had helped them get hold of the pipe lines--had in repeated cases, as the Erie, the Atlantic and Great Western, the Pennsylvania, the Cleveland and Marietta did, allowed them to lay their pipes on the lands of the railroads--and were now to see the pipe lines used to replace the railroads in the transportation of oil. These oil men saw what the railroad men had not the wit to see--or else lacked the virtue to live up to--that the pipe line is an oil railway. It requires no cars and no locomotives; it moves oil without risk of fire or loss; it is very much cheaper than the ordinary railway, for this freight moves itself after being lifted up by pumps. The pipe line was the sure competitor of the railway, fated to be either its servant or master, as the railroad chose to use it or lose it. The railways sentimentally helped the trust to gather these rival transportation lines into its hands; then the trust, with the real genius of conquest, threw the railroads to one side. A system of trunk-line pipes was at once pushed vigorously to completion in all directions. While the members of the oil trust were building these pipe lines to take away the oil business of the railroads, the officials of the latter were giving them by rebates the money to do it with. At the expense of their own employers, the owners of the railroads, these freight agents and general managers presented to the monopoly, out of the freight earnings of the oil business, the money with which to build the pipe lines that would destroy that branch of the business of the roads. It was the Tidewater that proved the feasibility of trunk pipe lines. The trunk pipe lines the combination has built were in imitation. Extraordinary pains have been taken to sophisticate public opinion with regard to all these matters--for the ignorance of the public is the real capital of monopoly--and with great success. The history we have transcribed from the public records is refined by one of the combination into the following illuminant: